Friday, May 23, 2008

Elm says widgets can make money with online advice

By Brendan Lynch

Brookline-based Internet startup Elm wants to help experts make money by putting their knowledge on the web.

Whether you’re trying to lose weight or buy a car, experts exist who can help you make a better-informed decision. According to Elm CEO Alon Landa, the Internet offers little in the way of a platform or an incentive for experts to dispense such valuable information.

Elm’s product is a framework for experts on any given subject to dispense and monetize their advice. Subject experts would enter their knowledge into the platform, which then becomes available via instant message with an automated avatar. The chat would be available through widgets on partnering websites and would carry targeted, contextual advertising.

Other advice websites, including Yahoo Inc.’s Yahoo Answers, Yelp, or About.com, would seem to perform a similar service, but Landa said he sees these sites as potential partners who could use Elm’s widgets rather than as competition.

The five-person company will begin a proof-of-concept phase in September. Elm is trying to raise $500,000 in funding from accredited investors, Landa said, and the company will likely seek a second round of funding, from angels investors or venture capitalists, after September.

Founded in January 2007, “Elm” was initially an acronym for “Executive Life Manager” — the name stuck when the business plan changed. Elm is taking  its time getting up and running, Landa said.

“If we go at 1,000 miles an hour right now, we’re going to build 80 percent the wrong thing,” said Landa, a technology consultant and software engineer who started his tech career building satellite applications for IBM Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp. in the 1990s.

The tool would be free for partner companies to use, Landa said. The company plans to make money by sharing revenue generated by the ads in the automated chats. 
“Our market is just about anything you can do a ‘dummies’ (book) for,” he said.

John Wilbanks, vice president of Science Commons and former assistant director at the Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said the killer app in the space would be technology that retrieved the most relevant answer to a question first. Too many incorrect or unrelated answers and people will stop using the widget, Wilbanks said.